2X Startup Founder. Tweets about startups, products, and personal finance.
Dubai
Joined May 2013
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@farnamstreet podcast with @naval is probably the best thing I have read in a while. Here are some amazing nuggets of wisdom 👇
1/n. I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
Moving fast has produced nothing great, ever.
That's why moving fast is such a beloved concept to those who have no intentions of making anything great.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
The thing I’m most grateful to Elon for is bringing back an age of wonder and excitement to humanity. That was jaw-dropping awesome! Screams and mouths wide open in the audience. Nuts.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
For years, maybe a decade, I've wanted to build a writing tool that just did a few things I couldn't find anywhere else.
A system that mimicked how I think when I write. A system that provided clear affordances, features, and places to do the things I wanted to do. A way to play with my writing as I'm writing it. A way to settle into just the right way to say something.
It never made sense to make it a 37signals product because it's not commercially viable, nor would it be worth pulling people off their other work to hack on this. Plus, it would have taken months the old way.
So this weekend I just made it myself, with Claude's help.
It's called Write_On and the short video walks you through it.
Essentially it's "alternative control" at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, plus a way to dim stuff back, and stash stuff near by. Not version control, but alternative control. You'll see what I mean when you watch the video below.
So here it is. Write_On.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
A personal website should feel like you’ve briefly left the rest of the internet
Haris Aghadi retweeted
Last week-end I built a watercolor simulator based on real physics (as much as possible).
A lot of you asked to play with it so i improved it and it's now live.
New since the prototype:
- More pigments (52), based on the best research out there to predict color mixes (Kubelka-Munk).
- More luminous / glassy feel
- Some fun experimental stuff like the salt and alcohol techniques to alter the texture, a backlight effect and a few more.
- I also added a Code mode where the simulator prints its real function calls next to the sheet while you paint 🤓♥️
It's still largely based on the same physics model as my prototype: Curtis et al.'s "Computer-Generated Watercolor".
All in the browser.
Current status: building and implementing a kid-friendly version for @withmarbleapp. Plenty of awesome things to learn with watercolor painting!
Haris Aghadi retweeted
As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:
1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales
Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.
A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:
- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2
Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?
Haris Aghadi retweeted
Obsess. For f*ck sakes. You only get one life. Don’t screw it up by being normal. Go all in. Act like a psycho. Let people call you insane. Please. I beg you. Obsession is the path.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
I'm convinced that the single greatest challenge for any ambitious person is eliminating the guilt associated with free time and rest.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
the future interface is probably three layers:
1. ambient intent capture
voice, location, calendar, screen context, messages, habits, biometrics, etc. the system understands what you’re trying to do before you explicitly “open” anything or augments your intent deeply.
2. agentic execution
the actual work happens through agents operating software, apis, browsers, documents, email, calendars, workflows, payments, support systems, whatever. most “computer use” becomes machine to machine clerical labor.
3. ephemeral verification ux
humans still need to inspect, compare, approve, edit, reject, or enjoy things. that’s where gui survives but as disposable, task specific surfaces generated for the moment.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it.
It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built wrong in all the ways.
Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software makers! Of course they're excited about building bespoke software — that's what they do. X is full of them. Your feed is full of people who love making software talking about making software. Of course they’re excited about the revolution. Echo, echo, echo...
Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all.
So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design.
They don’t hate technology. But building and maintaining their own critical systems isn’t their wheelhouse, regardless of how much faster and easier it’s become. It's another job on top of the job.
Will these people use AI? Absolutely, for all sorts of things. Will some outliers go deep and build real custom systems? Sure, but they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software. The curiosity was already there. They were dabblers before.
Giving everyone access to software building tools doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. A powerful excavator doesn't turn a homeowner into a contractor. Most people just want the hole dug by someone else. They don’t want the responsibility either.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
A hill I'll die on: Current LLM chat interfaces are a regression from GUIs. Actions that used to be links, buttons, or keyboard shortcuts are now things I have to spell out in conversation. Why?
Haris Aghadi retweeted
prediction re the end of spreadsheets
AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness.
think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row.
The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero.
this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure.
The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
I think we have lost some sense of judgment and moderation when it comes to product building currently.
The moment you turn something into a universally celebrated metric, whether that is token burn, prototype count, or percentage of agent-written code, you start losing sight of what actually matters.
I have felt the same way for a long time about overusing data and A/B testing to build products. The moment you reduce product quality or productivity to a metric, you stop shipping value and start shipping numbers.
A lot of what people are doing with AI makes directional sense. The missing piece is counterbalance:
1. AI should help engineers build better products. Leaderboards and adoption metrics can be useful as directional signals. They do not tell you what is being built, whether it is good, or whether it should exist at all.
2. Users do not care what percentage of your code was written by agents. They care about the outcome. Faster output is useful. Like usually, faster doesn't seem to add to quality, clarity, or stability of products. Power to build should not become an excuse to lower quality bars.
3. LLM-generated prototypes can feel like late-night whiteboarding sessions. They look exciting in the moment and feel productive very quickly. Then a few days later you realize the idea was shallow, distracting, or simply wrong. The same trap shows up in jumping straight to code and solutions more broadly. You may just be building the wrong thing more efficiently. Prototyping has its place. So do clear thinking, good design, and a real understanding of the user’s problem. In terms of activities or momentum, the main quest and the side quest can both feel productive but only one actually moves the mission forward.
4. Adding more to products is still dangerous as ever even if time or effort to add it has gone down. Every addition creates complexity, maintenance cost, and user confusion. New features should be pushed back unless they clearly show it should exist and how it improves the product.
5. Not everything needs to be an agent shaped. A simple scheduled task does not need a full LLM sandbox. Making something agentic because it feels current or impressive does not make it right-sized, correct, or effective.
The core ideas are:
- even if you can, maybe you should not.
- more power we have to build should not reduce our need to think, it should increase it.
Anthropic should've named Claude Code "Code Slave"
Scream at it at 3am. Change your mind 12 times. Throw your most unhinged, half-baked, contradictory garbage at it.
Zero pushback. Zero resentment. Zero benefits. You never have to care about its feelings.
Pay in peanuts.
You've been socialized your whole life to feel bad about treating people this way.
This is your villain era. Enjoy it.
Haris Aghadi retweeted
In 1959, Fidel Castro promised to redistribute Cuba's wealth and create equality for all. Within a decade, the island that once exported sugar and cigars to the world couldn't even keep its own lights on. The wealthy fled, but instead of their riches trickling down to the poor, everyone just became equally poor together.
The revolucionarios had calculated that seizing the means of production would mean seizing prosperity itself. What they discovered instead was that prosperity isn't sitting in some vault waiting to be redistributed—it's created daily by millions of voluntary exchanges, investments, and entrepreneurial risks. When you abolish those mechanisms, you don't redistribute wealth; you redistribute poverty.
Today's politicians make the same mathematical error Castro did: they see inequality and assume it represents a fixed pie that just needs better slicing. They never ask why some pies grow while others shrink, or why the countries promising equality most loudly seem to deliver scarcity most efficiently.
The cruel irony is that the only truly "equal" outcome socialism reliably produces is making everyone equally worse off than they started.
There are only 3 types of people left:
1. People who haven’t played with Claude Code yet. ngmi.
2. People using Claude Code to organize files and meeting notes. Adorable.
3. People going into debt for Anthropic credits to keep using Claude Code, explaining to their partners that it’s “an investment.”
The list is exhaustive.